


if you wanted to fight for a cause then go out and fall in love

by cyanica



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Flashbacks, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, Love Bites, M/M, Making Out, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Sexual Abuse, Past Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Steve Rogers, Psychological Trauma, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:28:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25785880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica
Summary: Steve’s skin, where Bucky’s lips had made a mark, erupted into watercolours of human purple, blue and black – only it wasn’t nostalgic watercolour paint that Steve always had running down his fingers; it was bruised, tortured flesh that had rotted underneath Bucky’s touch.Or the tainted mattress became drenched in Bucky’s sins, and though the warm, wetness of fresh blood is pooling all around them, all Bucky could do was stare at Steve. And Steve is just trying to recover what had been lost, save what had died, build it better.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 7
Kudos: 48





	if you wanted to fight for a cause then go out and fall in love

**Author's Note:**

> quarantine had me binge watching the entire mcu for the first time, and gotta say, stucky is some good shiet ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
> 
> tw in tags. the noncon is not between bucky and steve, it’s a flashback to bitchass hydra torturing bucky. it’s not graphically detailed, but referenced and briefly described.
> 
> this is set probably during ca:cw, or maybe after if bucky went with cap instead of staying in wakanda. 
> 
> title from ‘let me down easy’ - gang of youths.

Their mouths collided like starving, animalistic creatures in the dark deprived of another’s flesh, and the force of complete _absolution_ coursed through Bucky’s being like lightning. The glow of New York’s never-sleeping nightlife of a million light constellations erupted across his lips as if Steve were the entirety of the universe Bucky had ceased to exist from until he’d found rapture. 

Each other’s hands glided across both their bare, feverish flesh, tearing pieces of abandoned clothing from their writhing bodies that now lay discarded on the mouldy floorboards. Their kisses were harsh and desperate, in greedy ways they weren’t supposed to be – in ways they hadn’t ever been. Bucky pressed further and deeper into Steve as if it were the only thing he knew how to do, this invisible binding link between them rebuilding itself after the decades spent frayed and bloodied and dead. It was a line of life, of fate, and despite once being twisted rope – deformed into haunting nooses that hung from their necks by Bucky’s hand –, now, it had unravelled to become something of eternal unity in different ways.

What once was arcane and soft and innocent between them in alleyways and Brooklyn apartments, had morphed into absolute desperation, here in the broken world where reality had shattered a long time ago. The craving for each other’s flesh against their own, the _need_ to feel something that had previously been long and dead and buried, had consumed them. Suddenly this uncontrollable, desperate need to feel Steve in every way – in the impossibly closest way – was inevitably all he wanted. All he was. All they were. 

Steve fell against the mattress and Bucky fell with him. Steve’s fingers ran themselves feverishly, hungrily through his hair, pulling him down and closer towards the burning light that was his best friend, his Steve. 

Bucky dragged his lips over Steve’s salty skin, breathing in the scent of fire embers and earthy rosewood – something that now differed from the charcoal and lavender soap that he used to smell like – but it was _home_ nonetheless. 

(He knows realistically that ‘home’ is a distant, past fantasy that no longer exists for either of them since having become who they became, but that didn’t bother Bucky all that much when he was with Steve, existing as they currently were, connected as if they were one flesh. 

Bucky smelled of gunpowder and titanium – it was as if they matched.)

Bucky pressed a trail of fanatic kisses down Steve’s neck and left shoulder, sucking the skin between his teeth. He bit the delicate, soft skin as Steve continued to run his hands through Bucky’s hair, moaning soft breathy air against his ear. The sound was intoxicating. 

He felt Steve’s feet curl up in the way they used back when they were just two dumb kids who loved too hard, and Steve grasped the tufts of hair in his fists like it was something sacred, something to ground himself within a world when what was once forbidden became gospel.

It was only when he pulled away that –

Bucky didn’t feel quite like Bucky anymore, and Steve – the lingering taste of heat and salt on his tongue – didn’t feel quite like Steve.

The suddenness hit him like a comet, stars burning through to the back of his eyes and the sense of someone screaming _wrong wrong wrong_ imploded within his brain. Steve’s skin, where Bucky had made a mark, erupted into watercolours of human purple, blue and black – only it wasn’t nostalgic watercolour paint that Steve always had running down his fingers; it was bruised, tortured flesh that had rotted underneath Bucky’s touch. Saliva mixed with the pungent smell of crimson iron, and it spilled out across Steve’s shoulder where Bucky had bitten too deep, bruised too hard. The tainted mattress became drenched in Bucky’s sins, and though the warm, human wetness of fresh blood was pooling all around them, all he could do was stare at Steve.

Bucky lay frozenly still on top of Steve and stared at the wound he’d created in a dazed state of catatonic paralysis. 

_Malfunction – malfunction, instability. Soldier, respond! Dammit, respond! The asset’s malfunctioning, for fuck’s sake. Unstable – instability._

The more he stared, the more he fell away from the present reality, and instead became immersed into somewhere unclean, somewhere constantly frozen over and painted in black. Somewhere where his mouth always ached with electricity.

Layers and layers of sinful, bloodied deeds that drenched his tainted, infectious hands in human crimson, while electrifying tortured neurons pulsed with unrelenting currents of cerulean, cyanic fire across his breaking synapses, were all delicately constructed – hidden away – by ephemeral glass walls in his mind, threatening to break apart into fragmented, deadly shards of _longing, homecoming, furnace, freight car._

He could feel the glass shattering against his skull, bound to erupt the thousands of memories that resembled each mosaic piece of another’s blood on his flesh – _their skull crushed in his inhuman metallic fist – the taste of a firefight’s gunpowder from annihilated civilisations_ – into infinite stardust that was destined to asphyxiate them both within the gallows of the apartment, suffocate everyone at all amongst the ruins of the earth once he’d become something inhumanly unstoppable, something that was no longer enough of himself to be saved.

He was more than just broken – he was unsalvageable, condemned. HYDRA used to remind him of it as they flayed his skin down to the blackened bone with hot iron graters until he couldn’t resist anymore because the muscles used to struggle had been shredded away to crimson chunks of human flesh on the floor; or as they thrust their cocks deep inside him while he lay choking on his vomit and bile, burning from the inside out, and left to rot on the floor in his own shit because he couldn’t move for days. 

It was all just to reinforce the fact that he wouldn’t inexplicably remember that beneath his convulsing, naked, bloodied undead corpse that lay abandoned in God’s gallows, was a living human person, rather than an animal – a _tool_ that was contorted into submission, complete obedience. 

He was worth a repulsive fuck into a concrete floor of a rotting cell that was littered with a million broken shards of fragmented glass from a failed suicide attempt left to taunt him, and that was all.

He was supposed to be thrown back onto the tile wall, land in an unmoving, broken heap like his strings had snapped from the puppeteer orchestrating his body, which no longer felt like his own, owned by someone else to pull apart, to use, to break all over again.

 _He was bleeding from the back of his head – blood exploded from where his skull struck the concrete floor of the cell, smearing it against the walls and amplifying the ache in his head into an agonizing pound of nauseating vertigo and blurry eyes. The asset could still vividly feel the pull and tear and rip of what little clothing he'd had with a faceless, cold force writhing down his body through his haze of bloodless delirium. Someone – maybe there were two, three someones at this point – had ripped away bits of his flesh from their fingernails, torn skin that he didn’t feel anymore, and had let the crimson paint the floors, the walls, his own feverish body with his shame like a twisted masterpiece._  
  
_His eyes darted around the cell, drifting to the ceiling where he wouldn’t have to look at the faceless faces, as a body pressed itself on him, in him while the other held him down and suffocated his throat with their cocks. He’d learnt, or maybe his body subconsciously trained itself, to let reality sink away in these moments where he couldn’t be Bucky Barnes or the asset or a soldier anymore. He wasn’t anybody, anything – and gasping out Steve’s name like a rotting prayer from his own Godless’s mouth in desperate dissociation to swap reality for the past felt more sinful than anything else he’d ever done._

_And God there wasn’t enough blessed water in the world to cleanse those vermilion-drenched metal and flesh hands even if they were to be scrubbed down to the tiny pieces of shrapnel and human bone._

Like a dam breaking apart at the seams, the glass mosaic of Bucky’s memories burst and shattered and died into unsalvageable fragments. The taste of blood and vomit on his lips filled his mouth, and his hands ripped away from Steve’s flesh like he’d been burned, because all he could see was rotting corpses and broken brain matter, blue acidic poison infecting human veins and fiery explosions of mutilated bodies with his own hand holding the detonator.

The taste of Brooklyn and art morphed into ash and the putrid syrup of something distinctly human on his tongue, and in an insignificant effort that would never be enough to atone for it all, Bucky ripped himself from Steve’s lips and fell back in the way someone very small would into the edge of the mattress. His hand made of flesh and blood and bone was shaking as he held it out to protect Steve from himself, and suddenly the only thing he could remember was what his hands had done when they weren’t shaking, no matter how hard he tried to forget that. The other one – that one that shouldn’t be a part of him, but it was – he kept forcibly down, pressed into the side of his body like it didn’t have to exist if he wished it hard enough.

“Buck?” Steve said, voice dripping like intoxicatingly euphoric syrup into the soldier's soul. It had the complete and undeniable embodiment _home,_ and Bucky _ached_ to pretend, to lie, to exist in this fantasy that they were masquerading as innocent, naive teenagers blissfully drunk on moonshine and love in Brooklyn, but they were so far from who they had been, and even now, _he_ was barely an insignificant smithereen of who he was.

Steve gently reached a delicately placed hand to Bucky’s cheek, slowly and carefully as to not startle the other man any further. Bucky wanted to warn him, to scream at him to run – _run and let what should have died stay dead, to keep the past undeserving of retribution lay like a rotting, crimson infested corpse where it had been buried in a grave of ice and snow_ – but Steve didn’t. He caressed his wet, slick cheek with care that didn’t make sense, and allowed the intangible, unseeable metaphoric vermilion blood stain his hands, his flesh in the same way Buck was eternally tainted in the red. 

“Hey, come back to me.” Steve’s mouth was lucid oxygen on his own. It was a breath of hot, familiar air on the side of his burning cheek, and the calm, unbelievably patient voice felt like home. The soft, low rumble of his tone drifted Bucky through a cascade of stars, into earthly atmospheric gravity, anchoring him in the storm that had assaulted his whirlwind of a mind. It breathed clarity back into his being like he suddenly became lucid after thousands of years asleep in the snow. 

Dissociative fog still flooded the expanse of his universe within the mouldy, rotting apartment, but he was able to find his way through Steve’s grounding presence acting as a lighthouse, a haven that Bucky could keep coming back to when the taste of electricity burned through his tongue, or the smell of burning hair fussing with bone marrow ate away at his senses.

“Sorry,” Bucky breathed once his lungs had felt like they were no longer crushing the oxygen out of the universe. He looked around as if to reassure himself of reality, checking the window, the door, the concrete – _it’s not the same, it is not the same_ – and then running his hands along the mattress only to experience the sensation of being able to lie on a fucking mattress. 

“It’s alright.” Steve smoothed, sitting up and planting himself where he was, giving Bucky the space to recollect himself, readjust, recover. “We’re okay, you’re okay.” Steve told him, and though neither were probably very true, Bucky thought he could believe it if Steve said so – or at least he wanted to – maybe that was enough. Steve slowly sat a little further back against the wall, just barely letting the moonlight shine upon his frame where the glow lit up his silhouette, highlighting his neck, chest, and shoulder. It was the same shoulder that Bucky had bruised and bitten and left bloodied teeth marks and goring gashes within – only he didn’t. 

The flesh was smooth and pale and a little glistened with salty sweat, but unblemished, perfect, untainted. Steve was safe.

“I thought I…” Buck tried but the words sounded strange. The images of past and imaginary lingered through the backs of his eyes and scattered around his brain like stardust. He could still see the false wound across Steve’s flesh if he didn’t concentrate hard enough. “I don’t wanna hurt you.”

“You couldn’t.” 

He said it so easily. So easily it was unfair. Steve seemed to just be able to lie to himself that things weren’t real, weren’t fact, when they were – and Bucky wanted to hate him for it, because the tool he was made to be was _still inside_ of him, waiting as chaos was all he was. There was no atoning for that, for what he was and what he had done. It wasn’t enough to deny such standards. It would never be.

“I did.” 

“Bucky,” 

“No.” He said quickly, hating the look of pained remorse, of guilt on Steve’s face that shouldn’t belong there because they’d had this conversation, albeit not many times, but enough, and Bucky didn’t want to hear lies about who he wasn’t tonight. Tonight he wanted to touch and to feel and drown in something forbidden and something that resembled home.

The blood and blackened bruises flashed for milliseconds every time he blinked, but even so, reality was easier to decipher with Steve so vividly in front of him, real, tangible, and Bucky realised that he didn’t wanna talk, he didn’t even want sex, he just wanted something real, and they could worry about fixing it all later. Damn the rest of the world, their reason to fight, to live was always each other.

Bucky gave still a small, comforting not-a-smile with his eyes rather than his mouth, communicating more to Steve than words could. Steve waited for him to eventually draw himself closer, knowing when it was okay to press delicate lips to Bucky’s forehead, and how tightly they could wrap their bodies together.

Steve knew the way Bucky’s mind seemed to work, even after seventy years when it had been broken apart into smithereens, unrecognizably put back together, and then repeated timelessly until it became something else. He knew because those hauntingly beautiful pieces of _before_ slowly fell back into place with each breathy whisper, each sensitive kiss, and fleshy graze of collided, human skin. 

They had fallen in love, fallen apart, and fallen back together again to rebuild themselves better – and that was enough; that was all that was needed to recover what has been lost, save what had died, build something new.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!


End file.
